Having read only the first ten pages and then switched to pages 47-50, I'll just make some statement as to the "Why is earth the way it is?" thing. People tend to say that there has to be some kind of creator at work because otherwise you can't explain why earth is *just* the way it is, which seems to be *just* the only way it *can* exist. If you changed even some tiny parameters, earth becomes uninhabitable ...

Well, let me explain it this way: Take some standard-fantasy-novel about a brave young man who has to destroy some dark evil overlord despite thousands of dangerous situations and who is at the edge of dying about every half second or so.

In the end, he wins. Despite 8 thousand chances to die, he didn't. He lived. Now how unlikely is this? Why didn't he just die on his quest? You may answer it's good old "it's the way it is BECAUSE it's the way it is". But that's not the right answer.

The right answer is: There were thousends of thousands of young heroes who went out to destroy the evil overlord, but obviously the story is about the one who achieved his goals, because otherwise it wouldn't make any sense to write about it. To draw you a picture of this: Let's say you got millions of dangers on the way, for expample a hungry wolf, a poisonous snake, a crumbling cliff. And so on.

Hero #1 sets off and hey, he's lucky and passes Hungry Wolf while it's fast asleep. He accidentally steps onto the Poisonous Snakes head and gets away alive, but then he reaches for some stone at Crumbling Cliff and off he goes. Dead.

Hero #2 sets off but is somewhat unlucky as he runs straight into Hungry Wolf and gets eaten.

Hero #3 sets off but dies of lungcancer before even reaching Wolf or Snake.

[Put in Hero#4 - Hero#8394875436754348 here]

So HERE goes Hero#8394875436754349, and hey, THAT guy's a lucky bastard. Gets past thousands of dangers without taking any harm and kills the evil Overlord. Dammit, that guy's good!

Or wait - isn't he? Was he just lucky?

The reason why he managed to kill the Overlord is simple: Nature (you may call it Evolution) gave it a thousands or even a million tries. Even if try # 8 million doesn't work, maybe some future hero will achieve it. Nature will try on and on, regardless how many heroes it has to send out. And in the end, there will be one to manage it at least.
So this book you read about a hero who survives a thousand dangers is in fact not a book about a man with an unbevlievable amount of luck. It's just a book about the one man out of millions who did not fail where all the others failed.


I think you got the same type of "storytelling" on planet earth: There are millions (well, I think infinite, but let's put that aside for now) of planets in the universe that gave "Life" a try. They failed. But there are millions more on which project "Life" was a success. Now a few millions of planets gave project "Human" a try. Not all of them were successful.

Well, maybe there is only ONE planet that made it in the end (though I don't believe that).

But ONE is just enough to produce humans who will then go and ask: WHY the hell are we here? Why is everything JUST the way it is and not a tiny bit changed?

In fact, it is. But luckily not on this planet.